The dean of a particular academic division appears at your door, informing you that his faculty members have just met and decided that they need a new brochure to deal with low enrollment.
Then the alumni director catches you in the hall. She wants you to prepare a news release about the percentage of graduates who donate money to the college — it's gone up 10 percent since last year, she tells you, and in this economy!
Finally, the coup de grâce: The president calls you in for a meeting at which he tells you excitedly that he's just seen plans for the new science center and is convinced that it will be a way to get national media coverage for the college.
In the right circumstances, those may all be reasonable requests. Taken piecemeal and without context, they contribute to one of the greatest challenges facing campus public-relations officers: managing expectations. We sometimes make that challenge worse for ourselves, for a variety of reasons. We aim to please. We seek the path of least resistance. We're so pleased that people are finally thinking about marketing that we don't want to throw cold water on their ideas. We haven't done our homework.
But unless we become skilled at synthesizing the requests that come our way on a daily basis, insisting that marketing and promotional activities be undertaken as part of a comprehensive, well-thought-out plan, and recognizing that the decisions we make have implications not only for our budgets or workload, but for the image of the institution as a whole, then we will ultimately fail to meet everyone's expectations — including our own.
The three examples above are typical, and each requires a measured response. Faced with shrinking enrollments and left to their own resources, for example, professors in a struggling academic division often look for a cure in the known, the tangible, the tried-and-true: Let's do a brochure.
That might even make sense. Brochures, after all, can be an excellent way to promote a program — colorful, concise, and relatively inexpensive to print and mail. But how will it be used, and how does it fit into a broader strategy of promotional activities? For some programs, the brochure represents a form of catharsis: People feel helpless against enrollment trends, and transferring their anxiety into action in the form of a brochure can seem like a solution.
Yet while the academic division may desperately need marketing help, it does not mean that faculty members have the expertise to name the most appropriate tools or guide the process. When we work with a department on a marketing plan, professors are responsible for accurately describing their program's strengths and weaknesses at the outset, and then, when the plan is complete, for carrying out parts of it. (Professors may think that's not part of their job but, increasingly, it is; their livelihood may depend upon their willingness to help attract new students.) The responsibility for managing the marketing process falls squarely on the marketing team.
Especially in the current economy, the competition for students requires innovation, resourcefulness, and a personal touch. A brochure's greatest strength is its greatest weakness: It speaks to everyone. A more effective, if time-consuming, approach is a personalized letter to a prospective student from a professor in the field, describing the merits of the college and its program. The letter should be drafted by the marketing staff following consultation with faculty members. Much of the rest can be mechanized with a word processor, the final steps done by a staff assistant or secretary.
This is always a good test: Put yourself in the shoes of a 17-year-old high-school junior or senior. What would you find more persuasive? A beautiful but impersonal brochure or a signed letter from Joe Smith, Ph.D., professor of history, acknowledging your interest, extolling the virtues of his program, and inviting you to apply? Especially on small campuses that promote faculty accessibility, the answer is obvious.
An assessment of the efficacy of a brochure is a good initial response to the dean's request, but, of course, it is just one piece of the puzzle. There is advertising, but where, and how much? There is media coverage, but what are the stories and the best markets? There are special events, the alumni magazine, the Web, and yes, publications, provided they tackle a need and will be used as intended. The road to hell is paved with brochures that never left the shelves.
Most of all, what is the message driving the department's marketing plan? What makes its program distinct? Why would our hypothetical 17-year-old choose the college's program over a competitor's? We in marketing can help draw that message out and refine it, but we cannot make it up. In the absence of input from the academic side of the house, we are compelled to try, but the result will likely be another failed expectation.
Educating the campus about marketing and public relations requires a major investment of time from your office and from faculty members and administrators. Getting people to commit is not easily done. But it's your job to keep trying until the right people have sat down to develop, buy in, and help carry out the marketing plan.
Having made it this far, the bigger challenge remains: You should repeat this process with every academic division and relevant office on the campus. You then have to stitch these diverse threads into a single fabric that, despite its many colors, must emerge as whole cloth — harmonious, accurate, functional, and attractive. A campuswide plan must make the best use of the marketing department's finite resources. We are used to doing a lot with a little, but even the most creative marketing manager must work within limits that can frustrate the person or program making a request.
Trickier still, the marketing plan must reflect the institution's priorities.
There is a fine line here. Of course, there are others at the institution charged with setting policy and establishing priorities, from trustees to the president to senior staff members. Some of those priorities are articulated in long-term strategic plans. But because marketing affects every corner of the campus, it is the job of the marketing professional to evaluate the relative merits of putting greater or lesser effort on promoting a particular program within the context of the whole college, and then defending your recommendations accordingly. The strategic plan is a guide, the product of months of deliberation. The marketing plan must consider the document, but respond quickly to environmental shifts on and off the campus.
Take that new science center that the president thinks is of national interest. He or she may be excited about the new building, but its marketing potential must be vetted in the same way as a brochure. Is the center being built in response to low enrollment or, more likely, to make a strong science program even stronger? If the latter, does it make sense to promote it at the expense of other programs simply because it is the best institutional "story"? Just what is the story, anyway? Will the center house state-of-the art equipment that is not available on most campuses? Is there something unique about its design?
Please don't tell me the story is that the new building will be "green." Last fall I attended a meeting of college public-relations officers, with an education writer from The Boston Globe in the room. Nearly everyone there was pitching a new green building or activity on their campus. The writer politely turned them all aside. It wasn't news then, and that was six months ago. It may be a story for your local news media. But even there it is doubtful that your green plans are that unusual. You certainly have to have something more to take to the media beyond your region.
National publicity for the science center is probably unrealistic, and the president needs to hear that. Then you can discuss better ways to increase national visibility or celebrate the new building.
Similarly, the alumni director's news about increased donations is great for the college but of dubious interest to the general public. Sending out a news release to placate the director not only would fail to produce the desired result, but also could undermine the credibility of the public-relations office with journalists — it shows poor news judgment and wastes the media's time. The alumni magazine is a far better fit for that story (and even there, make it interesting!). There may be other, better strategies to keep the gift-giving momentum going that emerge from a coherent marketing plan. A news release about an increase in donations isn't one of them.
In the final analysis, recognize that, for all your efforts, the expectations game is one that you cannot win. You are not supposed to, and winning is beside the point. You don't want to blunt people's enthusiasm for their college or their pride in their work. You need their advice and cooperation to succeed. And you will always be the person on the campus who knows best the relative merits of a given request, its possibilities and limitations.
The goal is to manage expectations, not defeat them.
